The Apostles’ Creed began to be used in worship as a means of expressing the faith of the Church. The earliest creed seem to have been simply “Jesus is Lord” (Romans 10:9; 1 Cor.12:3; 2 Cor.4:5; Phil.2:11). When a person was baptized they declared that Jesus was their Lord. They declared their loyalty and commitment to Jesus, and trust in his saving work. As time went on it became necessary for Christians to explain what that meant. What did Christians believe about God, and Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, and the Gospel. By the fourth century the Apostles’ Creed, as we now know it, was being used in the western church. It was the creed candidates for baptism were expected to profess before they were accepted into membership of the Church. Today it serves three main purposes:

1. It provides a brief summary of the Christian faith. It does not contain all that we believe, and there are parts of it we may not understand, but it does provide a map and context for the faith of the Church.

2. It allows us to recognize and avoid inadequate or unbalanced versions of Christianity. Some people may prefer to emphasize one part of Christianity rather than another. The Creed provides a balanced and biblical approach, tried and tested by believers throughout the centuries. There are many deficient views of Christianity around. The Creed helps us to think through areas of faith that we might otherwise avoid.

3. It reminds us that to believe is to belong. To become a Christian is to enter a community of faith, which stretches back to the Upper Room. By putting your faith in Jesus Christ, you have become a member of his body, the Church, which through the ages has used this creed to express its faith. It gives you a sense of history and perspective. You share the faith with countless others throughout the world who pledge their allegiance to Jesus as Lord.

We begin with the words “I believe”, or credo in Latin, from which our English word creed is derived. What does it mean to believe, and what do Christian believe?

In Acts 16:22-34 we have the story of the baptism of the Philippians jailer and his family. A great earthquake had occurred, the foundations of the prison were shaken, the doors flew open, and every prisoner’s chains came loose. The jailer woke up, and when he saw what had happened, he drew his sword, and was about to kill himself, because he thought that the prisoners had escaped. The two apostles, Paul and Silas, saw what he was going to do and called upon him not to harm himself, by assuring him that everyone was still there. What then happens is simply extraordinary: the jailer is overcome with emotion, and begs them to tell him what he must do to experience the salvation of new life that he had heard them singing about in the jail before the earthquake.

This is how Peterson describes the scene: “They said, ‘Put your entire trust in the Master Jesus. Then you’ll live as you were meant to live – and everyone in your house included!’ They then went on to spell out in detail the story of the Master – the entire family got in on this part. They never did get to bed that night. The jailer made them feel at home, dressed their wounds, and then – he couldn’t wait till morning! – was baptized, he and everyone in his family. There in his home he had food set out for a festive meal. It was a night to remember. He and his entire family had put their trust in God; everyone in the house was in on the celebration.” (Acts 16:31-34, The Message)

Peterson translates “believe” as “put your entire trust in”. When John Gibson Paton (1824-1907), a Presbyterian missionary to the New Hebrides, began to translate the Gospel of John into the native language, he had a problem finding an equivalent word for ‘believe’. The natives were cannibals. There was no trust between them. They had no word for it. He asked one of his helpers to describe what he was doing. He told him that he was writing at his table. He then asked him what he was doing when he sat in his chair and lifted his feet off the floor. The native told him that he was resting his whole weight on the chair. That was the expression he utilized to describe what John calls ‘believe’. To believe is to put one’s whole weight on who Jesus is and what he has done. It is a relationship of complete trust with the person of Jesus Christ. To believe is to have a deep, personal relationship with Jesus Christ. It is to respond to an invitation by Jesus to become his disciple, his follower.

But what does that mean? Faith has to have content. You will notice that Paul and Silas spent the whole night telling the jailer and his family what it meant to believe in Jesus as Lord. They went on to spell out in detail the story of the Master. They probably covered the essentials of the faith just as they might be summarized in the Creed. To be baptized meant more than having a vague knowledge about an unknown God. He was introduced to God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Holy Trinity, the birth of Jesus, the significance of his life and teaching, his sufferings and death, his resurrection and ascension, his coming again in glory, the establishment of the Church, the forgiveness of sins, and the promise of eternal life. What a seminar it must have been. It was so exciting and new to them that they never did get to bed that night. A new world had opened up to them: a world in which they discovered a God who loved them and was searching for them, to invite them into his kingdom. This was not a God to be placated and humored, but a God who wanted to live with you, and within you, and through you to bless others. To believe meant to trust in someone who wanted to know and be known by you. The more you got to know him, the more you loved him. It was like a marriage between Christ and his Church, the bridegroom and the bride.

To believe means to trust in Jesus as Lord, it means to know what that means – faith with content, not just a blind trust, but an informed trust. It also means to become committed to all that. Courtship leads to the wedding at which the vows are exchanged. To believe in Jesus as Lord leads to baptism. The jailer and all his family wanted to be baptized that very night, and they were. In baptism God commits himself to the candidate, and the candidate commits himself to God, as revealed in Jesus. It is a joyful and willing surrender to God. It is a throwing open of the doors of our lives and inviting God to enter as our Lord and Master, to live with us forever.

The jailer was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God – he and his whole family. They had acted upon their belief. To believe is an active verb not a passive one. It is to obey the call. It is an act of the will to put your whole weight upon what you have come to understand as God’s truth in Jesus.

To believe is more than knowledge. It is obedience to what you know to be true. I may believe that there is a plane flying to Atlanta. I may check out flight times and even make a reservation and purchase a ticket. I may travel to the airport and see people get on the plane. I may believe that the pilot can fly the plane and that the equipment is trustworthy. But unless I put my whole weight upon that plane, by committing myself to entering it, and sitting down, and allowing it to fly me to Atlanta, it is of no use to me. To believe in Jesus is to act on that belief, it is to obey what it is saying to me. It is allowing God to take hold of me and allowing him to take me where he wants me to go.

Faith is deficient when a member of a Church may give intellectual assent to what the Creed represents, or is willing to be associated with those who believe, and yet holds back from wholehearted commitment. Their faith is passive. They do not act on their professed belief. They do not obey what it is saying to them. They avoid allowing God to take hold of them and allowing him to take them where he wants them to go. They don’t get on the plane. As a result their lives suffer from inadequate faith. They do not have the joy of faith represented by this Philippian jailer. They have a general, vague belief, but it does not have any specifics. Many of the words of the Creed are meaningless to them. They are stuck on the ground, and they never go any farther in their relationship with God. They are happy to have the benefits of church membership, but they don’t feel any excitement about it, and could take it or leave it. For them, it is not a matter of life or death. Belonging to the church is not that big a deal. The issue of faith is not that important to them.

The Rev. George Docherty preached a sermon in New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Washington D.C. on Feb.7, 1954, in which he urged that the words, “under God” be added to the Pledge of Allegiance. At that time the United States was engaged in a bitter struggle with communism. He said that the pledge lacked, “the characteristic and definitive factor in the American way of life, the fundamental concept of the Founding Fathers that the country exists because of God and through God. Indeed, apart from the mention of the phrase, ‘the United States of America’, this could be a pledge of any republic. In fact, I could hear little Muscovites repeat a similar pledge to their hammer-and-sickle flag in Moscow with equal solemnity.”

Sitting in the congregation that morning was President Dwight Eisenhower, who had been baptized in that church and was serious about his faith. When he left the church that morning the President told the preacher that he agreed with him entirely and set the machinery into motion to get the words “under God” inserted into the pledge of Allegiance. Congress passed the bill and Eisenhower signed it into law on Flag Day, June 14, 1954.

The rationale Docherty used was that the nation was facing a theological war, not just a conflict between two political philosophies, or two economic systems. He claimed that it was a fight for the freedom of the human personality. To quote, “It is Armageddon, a battle of the gods. It is the view of man as comes down to us from Judeo-Christian civilization in mortal combat against modern, secularized, godless society.”

Docherty helped to define and clarify, the nature of the ideological struggle that the nation was going through. The Apostles’ Creed is the Christian’s Pledge of Allegiance. It helps to define and clarify the nature of the identity of the Church. It challenges each person who says it with the choice of what he or she is willing to believe, trust in, commit his or her life to.

]]> https://www.tedschroder.com/what-does-it-mean-to-believe-in-jesus/feed/ 0 4035 https://www.tedschroder.com/chariot-of-fire/ https://www.tedschroder.com/chariot-of-fire/#comments Fri, 30 Oct 2026 22:04:30 +0000 https://www.tedschroder.com/?p=4033

R.S. Thomas is the author of “The Cry of Elisha After Elijah”, reflecting the famous incident recorded in 2 Kings 2 when the company of the prophets tell Elisha that the Lord was going to take his master away from him that day. Elisha hushes them, and tells them not to speak of it – just like we do when a loved one tells us that he is dying. We don’t want to talk about it or deal with it because it is so painful. Elijah reassures Elisha “As surely as the LORD lives and as you live, I will not leave you.” This is the promise that in life and death we are still one with the Lord: nothing shall separate us from the love of Christ (Romans 8:39). Our loved ones do not leave us, they are still present to us if they are in Christ. This is the message of All Saints’ Day which we celebrate every November 1.

While Elijah repeats his assurance that he will not leave Elisha, he also paradoxically asks him, “What can I do for you before I am taken from you?” He knows he is going to die and leave Elisha physically, but he will not leave him spiritually. In fact Elisha asks for a double portion of his spirit – his continuing presence in his life. Here we have an awareness of the communion of saints, the ongoing relationship of time and eternity, earth and heaven, that is present in the Spirit of God.

The moment of departure arrives when they are walking and talking together. Unexpectedly, suddenly, “a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind.” What a dramatic way to describe that passing of a great prophet from this world to the next. It gives me chill-bumps to read about it. Here is R.S. Thomas’s poem about it.

The chariot of Israel came,

And the bold, beautiful knights,

To free from his close prison

The friend who was my delight;

Cold is my cry over the vast deep shaken,

Bereft was I, for he was taken.

Through the straight places of Baca

We went with equal will,

Not knowing who would emerge

First from that gloomy vale;

Cold is my cry; our bond was broken,

Bereft was I, for he was taken.

Where, then, came they to rest,

Those steeds, and that car of fire?

My understanding is darkened,

It is no gain to enquire;

Better to wait the long night’s ending,

Till the light comes, far truths transcending.

I yield, since no wisdom lies

In seeking to go his way;

A man without knowledge am I

Of the quality of his joy;

Yet living souls, a prodigious number,

Bright-faced as dawn, invest God’s chamber.

The friends that we loved well,

Though they vanished far from our sight,

In a new country were found

Beyond this vale of night;

O blest are they, without pain or fretting

In the sun’s light that knows no setting.

This affirmation of the communion of saints is at the heart of the teaching of Jesus. It is rejected today by secular humanists who believe that their understanding of science has caused intelligent people to dispense with any belief in life beyond this one. Adam Gopnik, writing about Charles Darwin in The New Yorker, maintained that Darwin, after the death of his favorite daughter Annie at age ten, abandoned his Christian faith and became, essentially, a stoic.

“He believed that the contemplation of the immensity of time, and the repertory of feelings, was all that was left to us. There was no inherent meaning in Annie’s dying at ten, except the recognition that mortality was the rule of existence; serenity could be found only in the contemplation of the vast indifference of the universe.” (The New Yorker, October 23, 2006, Rewriting Nature, p.58)

What would Jesus say? He replied to this argument in his debate with the Sadducees, who also denied the resurrection. What is the ground for the hope of a life beyond death? Jesus takes them back to another Old Testament incident – when Moses encountered the burning bush. God said to him, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” Sir John Polkinghorne, a former Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University, and an Anglican minister draws this important conclusion from these words.

“God is not someone who cares for a person today and then cannot be bothered about that person tomorrow…if the patriarchs mattered to God once – they must matter to God for ever. Jesus says, ‘He is the God not of the dead but the living.’ Jesus’ argument is powerful and convincing. We have no simply natural expectation of a destiny beyond death. As far as science, or any other purely human form of knowledge can tell us, death is the end. But death is not the ultimate end, because only God is ultimate. Our hope of heaven rests solely, but absolutely adequately, on the merciful faithfulness of God. If we matter to God today – and we certainly do – then we shall matter to God for ever.” (Living With Hope, p.43)

When we encounter skepticism regarding resurrection to eternal life we must remember the words of Jesus: “Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God.” Or as The Message puts it, “You’re way off base, and here’s why: One, you don’t know your Bible; two, you don’t know how God works.” (Mark 12:24)

One day we will experience the ride of our lives when we get on board our chariot of fire.

Swing low, sweet chariot.

Coming for to carry me home.

I looked over Jordan, and what did I see

Coming for to carry me home?

A band of angels coming after me,

Coming for to carry me home.

Sometimes I’m up and sometimes I’m down

But still my soul feels heavenly bound.

The brightest day that I can say,

When Jesus washed my sins away.

If I get there before you do,

I’ll cut a hole and pull you through.

If you get there before I do,

Tell all my friends I’m coming too.

Swing low, sweet chariot

Coming for to carry me home,

Swing low, sweet chariot,

Coming for to carry me home.

(Etta James)

Why do people believe in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior? It depends on their particular circumstances, their needs, and their exploration of the process toward personal conviction. As I have journeyed through life with all its challenges I have come to several reasons for my faith.

The first reason is the existence of life itself. As I observe and participate in life I am aware of its incredible variety and complexity. The size of the universe, and the minute calibrations that are essential to sustain life, convince me of the reality of God who has created life for a purpose. Life does not make sense to me without the initiation and sustaining power of a Creator. Life is more than a product of Chance. To believe in nothing but nihilism and that life is futile and destined for destruction flies in the face of reality. As St. Paul put it, “he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else…. For in him we live and move and have our being.” Through the miracle of creation God provides the genesis and environment that makes life possible. “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever.” The origin of life, the sustainer of life, and the end or goal of life is God. Which God? “For us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.”

An atheistic view of origins does not make sense to me. To view the universe as nothing more than a gigantic organism, or a complex mathematical formula, or a biological computer, flies in the face of the reality of human identity and relationship. A purely secular, merely scientific view results in reducing life to naturalistic phenomena. It is an inadequate interpretation of human behavior that does not account for meaning, purpose, significance and value. Love cannot be defined in purely secular terms. Community cannot be sustained from solely secular psycho-sociological, political and economic perspectives.

Life that has purpose and hope to it necessitates a Creator who is personally involved and lovingly concerned for his offspring. That is why God continually communicated with his people through prophets, and why he came himself to intervene on our behalf. The Creator revealed his purpose through his spoken Word, and also through his Living Word, Jesus Christ. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men…. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

I believe that Jesus Christ is the human face of the Creator. Why do I believe that? Because his life perfectly reveals God to me. He acts as the Creator by exercising his power over nature: stilling the storm, multiplying the loaves and fishes, raising the dead, healing the sick, and defeating death. He acts as God by exercising the power to forgive sins, to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of heaven, and to pass divine judgment. He shows us the significance of human life, and its eternal value, through his life, death and resurrection,

Without a belief in eternal life, human life would be, as Thomas Hobbes put it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Life, with all its meaning and significance, makes no sense to me without life beyond the grave. When my grandmother died I was 12 years of age. I simply could not believe that a life that was so valuable could suddenly cease to matter. Ecclesiastes in the Bible states the obvious: “God has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” Jesus came to reveal the nature of eternal life, to assure us of it as a gift, through union with himself. As we live with him we enjoy the reality of eternal life. He is “the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies.” I believe that this is true, because I believe that he is the origin and source of life, and that he has defeated human mortality through his own death and resurrection on our behalf.

The second reason I believe in Jesus Christ is because of sin and evil. I grew up in the aftermath of World War II and learned from survivors of the horrors of Japanese prisoner of war camps and German concentration camps. A book that made a great impression on me as a youth, which was in our bookcase at home, was White Coolies by Betty Jeffrey. Published in 1954 it told the story of a group of 65 Australian Nurses who were evacuated from Singapore just before it surrendered in 1942. Two days later, their ship, the Vyner Brooke, was bombed and sunk by the Japanese. Twenty-two of the survivors were cold-bloodedly murdered and the remainder taken prisoner. In spite of the constant danger of discovery and consequent brutal punishment, Sister Jeffrey kept this diary as a record of three and a half years’ spirited resistance in the face of infamous maltreatment. A few year’s ago it was made into a movie, called Paradise Road, starring Glenn Close.

Later I became aware of the brutality of communist rule. The evils of totalitarianism were enough evidence for me to see the failure of atheistic ideology, and the necessity of being accountable to a God of justice and love. My own life, and that of the world, witnessed to the need of a Savior. The words of St. Paul accurately described the human condition: “so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God… for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

The evils in the world, man’s inhumanity to man: corruption, crime, terrorism, exploitation, the way mentally sick people transfer their pain onto their spouses and their children, anger, greed, selfishness, the need to be in control, and so the list could go on, cries out for justice, and redemption. We are accountable to God for our behavior. Jesus is our Judge as well as our Savior. I am convicted of my own sinfulness. My conscience is held captive to the Word of God. I have to deal with my own guilt and failure, my anxiety and despair. The words of St. Paul ring true of my self-awareness: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do… I know that nothing good lives in me, that is in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on doing.”

I believe in Jesus Christ because he came to set me free from the compulsion to sin, and the condemnation for sin. By his atoning sacrifice on the Cross he broke the power of sin over me. In exchange for my sinful guilt he gave me his pure righteousness, so granting me forgiveness and acceptance before God. In addition he gave me the gift of his Spirit to enable me to choose freely for good. The personal intervention of God in Christ on behalf of the human race includes the infilling presence of the power of his Spirit to accomplish his purposes in us and through us. I believe in Jesus Christ because he made possible the redemption of the worst of people, and the transformation of their character. He came to heal the sin-sick soul, to make whole the conflicted personality, to set free the obsessive-compulsive and to reconcile those who are alienated. Because God in Christ is love, he can help me to love others, something I could not do in my own strength. Instead of expecting me to measure up to his high standards he came down to my level and offered to live in and through me. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any one hears my voice and opens the door I will come in to him and eat with him and he with me.”

In St. Paul’s Cathedral in London there hangs a large painting by Holman Hunt called The Light of the World. It portrays Christ holding a lamp in a dark garden and knocking at a door that appears not to have been opened in a long time, for it is covered with weeds. It has no handle on the outside for him to open it. The door stands for the human heart. Christ, the light of the world, seeks admittance into our lives, so that he might banish the darkness of sin, and death. Only we can open that door by faith. He will not force his way in. He offers his grace – his unmerited, unearned gift of salvation. He asks for us to respond in faith, by receiving what he freely offers.

It is this transforming power of Christ and his Gospel that makes him the hope of the world. Political programs and parties come and go, but the Gospel of the kingdom of heaven is eternal. It is that Gospel which has motivated people to improve the living conditions of people, and care for them in their poverty, and sickness. It is Christ who lives in the needy of the world and who motivates his followers to do something about their condition. “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”

I believe in Jesus Christ because he speaks to my needs and the needs of a divided and hostile world. It is only in him that there can be peace. “For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.” He is the peacemaker and he calls me to follow in his steps and be a peacemaker also. He offers to produce the fruit of His Spirit in my relationships with others: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These virtues I cannot practice without abiding in him, living with him, following him, on a daily basis.

Lastly, I believe in Jesus Christ because, as God is spirit, he is always present. He promised that he would be with us always. That means that God is with me as I trust in him and follow where he leads me. It means I can do everything through him who gives me strength. This does not mean that life is always sunshine, and the way is always smooth. To walk with Jesus means walking the way of the Cross, as well as the way of the resurrection. It means sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death before attaining to the resurrection from the dead. It may mean being rejected and misunderstood as he was. It certainly means being a servant to others, humbling oneself, as he did. Heaven may be our goal and our prize, but there is much to do and to accomplish in this life. We are to “run with perseverance the race marked out for us by fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”

Why do I believe in Jesus Christ? Because he is my companion and guide, my brother and friend, my master and mentor, my Lord and my God. He soothes my sorrows and heals my wounds. I come to him, when I am weary and heavy-laden and find rest. I take his yoke upon me, and learn from him, for he is gentle and humble in heart and I find rest for my soul. He opens my blind eyes, and loves me, and calls me to serve him. He never lets me down. He has blessed me beyond measure. He is the treasure that is worth finding.                 

I graduated from university with a double major in History and English. History is important to me. I value the history of my culture, and enjoy learning more about the events that have formed the world in which I live. The history of my family educates me about the influences that have made me who I am. In the study of history I became very aware of how ‘facts’ can be interpreted by different schools of thought. No matter what the orientation of the historian we still have to deal with the actuality of historic events. Historical research involves collecting the data and coming to some conclusion about them. It was natural for me to approach my understanding of the Christian faith in that way. The historical fact of the person and ministry of Jesus, with his impact on the world, became an important part of my faith. But over the years I have seen many different interpretations of the life and significance of Jesus. The Bible itself has been analyzed and criticized by generations of scholars with their own axes to grind. Any bookstore shelf on Christianity is stocked with multiple interpretations of the significance of Jesus. Writers, claiming to be objective scholars, who occupy prestigious university posts, are constantly publishing new views about Jesus and the Bible. Who to believe? How important is history to faith? What credence do we put in the latest magazine or newspaper article purporting to reveal new evidence for debunking the traditional view of Jesus as God come in the flesh?

The New York Times reviewed Sam Harris’s book, The End of Faith. The reviewer was described as a writer on the subjects of atheism and science for The Times, The American Scholar and elsewhere. She wrote, “Sam Harris presents major religious systems like Judaism, Christianity and Islam as forms of socially sanctioned lunacy, their fundamental tenets irrational, archaic and, important when it comes to matters of humanity’s long-term survival, mutually incompatible. A doctoral candidate in neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles, Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say in contemporary America: ‘We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them ‘religious’; otherwise, they are likely to be called ‘mad,’ ‘psychotic’ or ‘delusional.’ The danger of religious faith, he continues, ‘is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruit of madness and consider them holy.’”

What do we say to such writers? Soren Kierkegaard in Philosophical Fragments addressed these issues in 1844. There is nothing new in these kinds of criticisms of Christianity. There are writers in every age who repeat the same arguments. The following is a summary of Kierkegaard’s response to the rationalists of his day as expounded by Dr. Murray A. Rae, to whom I am indebted for this material.

From when I first became a Christian in 1955, and worked in college student ministry, it was considered necessary to be able to counter the arguments of rationalists like Bertrand Russell with logical reasons for faith. I became adept at being able to cite historical evidence for the truth of Christianity. I interpreted history as providing positive arguments for the truth of the Christian faith. But critics of Christianity also can find historical arguments for their own position. The fulfillment of the prophecies, the signs of the miracles of Jesus, the nature of the incarnation and resurrection, the growth of the Church, and the effect of Christianity on the history of the world cannot prove the truth of Christ because there is no way to verify the claims. These events may serve as illustrations of the truth of Christ, but they cannot conclusively demonstrate them to be true. Even those who witnessed the life of Jesus had a hard time of identifying him as the Messiah because of the hiddenness and lowliness of his life. Jesus was aware of this when he explained why he taught in parables: “You will ever be hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.”

The historical testimony of the Scriptures serves as the occasion through which we are confronted with the need to believe, but it is not in itself a sufficient ground of faith. Without the condition, or means of faith, which is given by God, historical testimony remains indecisive. “Apostolic witness has always to wait upon the life-giving breath of the Spirit.”

Those who have criticized the accuracy of the New Testament maintain that there is no historical evidence that Jesus is divine. Even if they have proved to their satisfaction that Jesus, as we know him in the Christian faith, never existed, it does not follow that the authors of the New Testament did not exist, or that Christ did not exist. The witness of the apostles to the person of Jesus at a point in time is historical evidence to which we must give or withhold assent. We are required to give an assent to a fact of history. That event is the way God has revealed himself to us. Truth about God cannot be the product of our own deliberations because of our own limitations. The only way we can know the truth about God is that God reveals it to us.

When Simon Peter confessed that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God, Jesus replied, “this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven.” The apostle was not capable of knowing the truth of the identity of Jesus except by the revelation of God. His human reason was insufficient to comprehend the truth about Jesus.

Christianity is a call to follow Jesus in the discipleship of obedience. To follow him by imitating the pattern of his life requires a body of reliable historical knowledge of Christ. The only Jesus we know is to be revealed in the pages of the Gospels. Those who are skeptical of the trustworthiness of the Gospels are providing themselves with the means of avoiding the challenge of the claims of Jesus upon them.

Jesus tells the parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector to those who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else. It is a parable of two types of human beings. One, the Pharisee, is full of his own accomplishments, and boasts of them. The other, the tax-collector, is too aware of his failings, his sinfulness, his inadequacies, to even look up to heaven. The Pharisee is reminiscent of the type who is full of his own intellectual abilities, and who, subsequently worships himself, whereas the tax-collector humbles himself and calls on the mercy of God as his only hope.

“In Judge for Yourself!.. Kierkegaard adduces the contrast set forth in 1 Peter between sobriety and drunkenness to suggest that it is the Christian who sees and understands the Truth while the wisdom of the world merely clouds and distorts. With consummate wit Kierkegaard has someone of ‘secular mentality’ drunkenly proclaim, ‘I stick to facts. I am neither a fanatic nor a dreamer nor a fool; I believe nothing, nothing whatever, except what I can touch or feel; and I believe no one, not my own child, not my wife, not my best friend; I believe only what can be demonstrated – because I stick to facts.’ The soliloquy continues becoming ever more repetitive and ridiculous until finally in a drunken stupor the speaker admits, ‘The only thing, I suppose, that would momentarily disturb me would be if someone had the notion to say that I was drunk, intoxicated – I, the coldest and calmest and clearest common sense.’

“The drunk’s principles, of course, are the maxims of rationalism: Believe nothing, stick to facts, trust no one, insist on demonstration… Is this not a kind of madness? Even if it could be done, and Kierkegaard thinks it impossible, would adherence to such principles not constitute an impoverished and ultimately inhuman existence? To whoever believes it possible, ‘the apostle says, “Become sober!” – and says thereby: You are intoxicated; unhappy one, if you could see yourself, you would shudder, because you would see that you are like an intoxicated man when he – disgusting! – scarcely resembles a human being.”

The rationalist is drunk on his own ability to pass judgment on what God (if God exists) can do. His logic is impaired by his addiction. He thinks it is irrational to believe in Christ. But irrationality is the contravention of some principle of logic. It is not illogical to claim that something which is inaccessible to human enquiry may be revealed to us by God. The alternative to reason is divine revelation, which calls into question the authority human reason has claimed for itself. God reveals the error of those who trust absolutely in their own intellectual capacity.

Reason must give up its claim to being the ultimate authority. God gives understanding through faith, but on the condition that human understanding recognizes its own limitations. Reason wants to presuppose what God can and cannot do. That is why human reason is offended by the Gospels’ confession that in the human figure of Jesus, the eternal God is present extending an invitation to love and follow him.

Christianity confesses that the truth about Christ is learned neither by speculation, nor through imagination, nor by historical investigation, but rather by virtue of the gift of faith. Receiving the gift of faith brings about a radical transformation, a new birth, a conversion. This involves letting go the authority of human reason – the abandonment of all preconceptions about God, and about humanity in relation to God. If we are to receive faith then we must admit the limitations of our own rational capacity. Reason needs to be redeemed. St. Paul talks about personal transformation by “the renewing of your mind.” When that happens “you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

The truth about Christ is not capable of being learned by reason because humanity’s reason is infected by sin. So Christ has to give us the means to understand it. That means is faith. There has to be a repentance and a conversion – a new birth such as Jesus mentioned to Nicodemus. God has to come into our lives, by his Spirit, and give us the means to understand the truth, not only about God, but about ourselves.

The sinner is bound – he is not in possession of freedom to make any choices. We cannot freely decide to repent of our sins and then present ourselves before God to receive his grace. Our knowledge and our freedom to choose are contingent upon the divine gift of grace. However we are free to respond to the grace that has been done for us and disclosed to us in Jesus. By coming among us as a human, God in Christ has made it possible for us to respond to him, but he also allows the possibility of rejection, because he comes anonymously in humility. God does not force himself upon us.

How does God extend his grace to us so that we can receive the gift of faith? St. Paul tells us, “How, then, can they call upon the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent…Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ.”

Hearing the word of Christ is the gift of grace. God’s action of revelation is the means by which recognition and repentance becomes possible. The choice now confronts us as to whether we will respond in faith. It is not intellectual assent that is required, but the response of living in the light of the truth that has been revealed.

“Learning the Truth cannot be reduced to a work of the intellect. It is not the preserve of reason, or of the imagination, or of memory. Instead it is a way of life in the company of Jesus whose identity as the Truth is confirmed by those who have known his blessing along the way.”

Faith is a mode of existence, and only those who take the plunge, who venture out over the seventy thousand fathoms of water, are in any position to learn the Truth. “Understanding Christianity is like learning to swim: it is only when entering the water, when setting out upon the life of faith, that one begins to understand.” You cannot evaluate Christian faith from the point of view of philosophical detachment. That is like trying to swim without getting into the water.

“Faith is a matter of personal response to and trust in the God-Man who confronts us with the challenge to follow him… The first disciples came to recognize Jesus and confess him as Lord only in the act of following him.” That is the only way we may come to understand the essential truth of the Christian faith.

(Murray A. Rae, Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation: By Faith Transformed, Clarendon Press, Oxford,1997)

What causes people to follow Christ, or to believe in other religions? Is it on the basis of evidence we have come to believe as compelling? What causes us to continue to believe when there is contrary evidence? What would we have done if Jesus had come to us and invited us to follow him? How would we have responded to him or to any other spiritual leader who invited us to believe in him?

We see this happening at the beginning of the ministry of Jesus. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” Philip decided to throw in his lot with Jesus. Why? We have a clue from his remarks to Nathanael. “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets wrote – Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”

Apparently Philip and others were convinced, on the evidence they had gathered, that Jesus was the promised Messiah (the one prophesied in the Hebrew Scriptures), who had come (as John the Baptist said), to ‘take away the sin of the world.’ John had been preparing the way for the Messiah to come by preaching the necessity of undergoing a baptism to signify repentance for sins. Jesus fulfilled his description and John pointed to him as the Lamb of God, the one who has surpassed him, the one who might be revealed to Israel. John the Baptist testified that Jesus was the Son of God upon whom he had seen the Spirit come down and remain.

Philip was therefore accepting the testimony of one whose authority he respected: John the Baptist. He had also heard Jesus speak, and he may have seen him heal the sick. As a result of this personal exposure to Jesus, the testimony he received from John the Baptist was verified enough for him to agree to follow Jesus.

This was not good enough for Nathanael, who cynically responded to Philip’s enthusiasm, “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” Or, as Eugene Peterson puts it, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

What is enough reason to believe, for one person, may not be enough for someone else. I used to think that faith simply equaled commitment on the evidence. I thought that if you just laid out the evidence for the identity of Christ, people would have to believe. In other words, I thought that people could be persuaded to believe only on the basis of rational argument. While argument and persuasion can be part of evangelism, it is not the reason most people come to believe.

The rational side of our minds is only one way we see reality. Reason is not the only way we get to truth. We can find reasons to interpret evidence one way or another. All evidence requires interpretation. Much evidence in matters of belief is circumstantial. Would we have found belief in Christ easier if we had been with Philip or Nathanael? I don’t think so. There were many others who saw the same evidence in the person and ministry of Christ who did not follow him. The reasoning process is morally and practically neutral, which can be used for good or ill. Daniel Taylor, in The Myth of Certainty, writes,

“There is no more spurious use of reason than to suggest that reason demonstrates that faith in God is irrational. It simply is not so, and anyone who argues such does not understand the nature of reason or faith. They are also wrong, however, who claim that reason and evidence prove the existence of God. God is not reducible to proof and only our weakness makes us wish it were so….In fact, reason recedes in importance in most of the truly critical areas of the human experience, largely because there are forces at work with which reason is not adequate to deal…. Reason is not usually the crucial component of one’s love for another (over-analysis may actually weaken the love by turning the beloved into an object), or of one’s response to a work of art (unless one has to explain – rationalize – the response), or of what one ultimately values in life. Neither should it be the primary tool by which one evaluates a relationship with God…reason is simply inadequate for the task.”

Why then do we believe what we believe? Our belief is the way we make sense of our existence. It meets our inner needs for love, security or fulfillment. Most people unconsciously accept the belief of those around them, without thinking about it. Others search for their understanding of life and for their personal fulfillment. They seek an explanation of life. We accept or reject evidence presented to us based upon our beliefs. Philip accepted the evidence presented to him by John the Baptist, his reading and interpretation of the Scriptures, and his personal experience of Jesus. Nathanael was not ready to do that. He was cautious about trusting the recommendations of others. He was not prepared to give his allegiance to someone he had not yet personally evaluated. Jesus’ credentials were not impressive to Nathanael. Nazareth? You’ve got to be kidding! How could a guy from a back-water like Nazareth be qualified to deal with the knotty problems of the world like the existence of so much evil and suffering, and the competing claims of so many religions?

Whether we agree with the faith of others or not, we live in a world in which there are many different truth claims. What do we do with them? Pluralism is the world view that allows for many different interpretations of the evidence, except the interpretation that there is only one way. Taylor writes,

“The pluralist expects to find many different perspectives in the world and does so, thereby confirming his or her outlook. He or she is likely to feel offended, or even threatened, however, by the person who claims there is only a single correct explanation of reality or a single right answer to a social problem….Each is immune to the arguments of the other, finding in them only further confirmation of their own position. We fend off competing world views because by threatening our present understanding of reality, they threaten our essential security…. Flannery O’Connor realized this when she wrote, ‘my communications… sound as if they came from a besieged defender of the faith. I know well enough that it is not a defense of the faith, which don’t need it, but a defense of myself who does.’ When people defend their world view, they are not defending reason or God, or an abstract system; they are defending their own fragile sense of security and self-respect. It is as instinctive as defending one’s body from attack.”

How do you remain faithful to your own belief and yet respect the beliefs of others? We do believe in the freedom of religion, and the freedom of speech, in this country. Such a belief requires the tolerance of a marketplace of ideas even when we disagree. Taylor quotes Kierkegaard, who counseled the greatest sensitivity for those who seek to lead someone from error into truth:

“First and foremost, no impatience… A direct attack only strengthens a person in his illusion, and at the same time embitters him. There is nothing that requires such gentle handling as an illusion, if one wishes to dispel it. If anything prompts the prospective captive to set his will in opposition, all is lost. The indirect method, loving and serving the truth, arranges everything, and then shyly withdraws (for love is always shy), so as not to witness the admission which he makes to himself alone before God – that he has lived hitherto in an illusion.”

This is how Philip handles Nathanael. Philip invites him to “come and see” Jesus for himself. When he does, Jesus greets him with the words, “Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false.” He acknowledged that Nathanael didn’t have ‘a false bone in his body’. (Peterson) Nathanael, said Jesus, was a man of integrity, a man who was open to the truth. Jesus showed respect for this seeker after truth.

Nathanael was taken aback. “How do you know me?” he asked. Jesus answered, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.” This must have penetrated to the core of Nathanael’s being because he responded with a declaration of faith. Something profound must have happened under the fig tree when he was in prayer or communion with God. Perhaps it was some crisis in his life, some deep desire for truth which he was seeking at the time. Whatever it was, it convinced Nathanael that this was no ordinary man, no charlatan, but someone who knew him in the essence of his being, and loved him. Jesus knew him – knew all about him, knew all about his dreams, and his hurts, his frustrations and his weaknesses, his secrets and his sins, yet he valued him, was interested in him, wanted to be associated with him, wanted him to be on his team, and this was supposed to be the revelation of who God was? His response was immediate, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God, you are the King of Israel.” The cynic is transformed into the convinced follower. What before was an interesting introduction to another teacher turned into a close, personal friendship. A personal experience of communion with God in Christ made all the difference.

Faith has its reasons to believe. We all need some evidence to believe. If we have experienced a personal relationship with Jesus, like Nathanael, an ‘Ahaa’ encounter with God, it is possible to continue to believe even when other evidence seems to count against our belief. In fact Jesus warned us that, “false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect.” There will be times when personal tragedies, and counter-claims by other spiritual leaders, will try our faith. Such times, when there is room to doubt, will challenge us to deepen our trust in the one whom, we believe, knows us best and loves us most. We do not abandon our faith in Jesus just because other evidence would give us reason to jump onto another bandwagon. Because of our personal relationship with God as revealed in Jesus, we prefer to trust in him, despite contrary evidence. C.S. Lewis put it this way: “To love involves trusting the beloved beyond the evidence, even against much evidence…You are no longer faced with an argument which demands your assent, but with a Person who demands your confidence.” (On Obstinacy in Belief)

Nathanael said of Jesus, “How do you know me?” Jesus says to you and me, “I know you, I see you in your deepest need. I know your longings, your fears, your hopes, your pain, your struggles. I love you. Come, follow me, walk with me in this journey called life, and I will lead you in the way everlasting.”

Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century understood the world through the lens of experimental science. Believing that all phenomena operated according to universal natural laws, they judged every intellectual proposition according to the test of reason. Their attitude was one of skepticism of anything seeming improbable or unreasonable, one of questioning supernatural religion and divine revelation. The Enlightenment embraced the idea of progress, trusting in the perfectibility of humanity, and the gradual elimination of superstition and prejudice. Radical Enlightenment philosophers in Europe rejected Christianity as improbable and superstitious, considering the miracles of the Bible as mere hoaxes. They embraced Deism, a religion of nature and reason. The Deists’ god, like a watchmaker having wound his watch, stood aloof from his creation, allowing it to run on its own according to natural laws. This distanced God from the world of people.

The Enlightenment made the search for faith more difficult by depersonalizing the object of faith. Because of the concern to establish the objectivity of truth, there has been the concentration on the necessity of having to agree with the facts of faith. This reduced the exercise of faith to acceptance of doctrine about God rather than personal trust in the Savior. People became brainwashed by the prevailing intellectual requirements for objective criteria for belief. This is not to say that doctrinal statements are not useful and necessary expressions of what we believe. The revelation of God was not a statement of faith, but a person, yet we must be able to state who that person was. Christianity is not an undefined mysticism. Being able to state its truth in words is essential if we are to understand its nature and be able to communicate it to others.

Today, while there are still some secularists who would deny it, there is a philosophical consensus that the Enlightenment dogma that there are universally agreed principles of human rationality is no longer accepted. There is no universal human reason to which we can objectively appeal. There is no single set of objective criteria by which all beliefs can be tested. There is no objective, rational authority that has displaced God. There are many different ways of reasoning. Different people at different times and places have differing concepts of what is true and rational. The criterion for truth is determined by the nature of the subject matter. The natural sciences and mathematics have their own criteria to evaluate the truth of their research. They utilize objective means appropriate to their disciplines, but such means are not appropriate to other areas of reality. What works for the physical sciences, such as biology, chemistry and physics, does not work for philosophy and theology. To claim that the Enlightenment has eliminated the spiritual, the supernatural, or the religious, because we have evolved to the point where scientific knowledge has disproved their claims, is to fail to appreciate the differences between areas of knowledge of each subject matter.

Roger Poole in his ground-breaking critique of objectivity, Toward Deep Subjectivity, defined it in this way:

“Objectivity is what is commonly received as valid, all the attitudes, presuppositions, unquestioned assumptions typical of any given society… Objectivity in any given society in fact gets defined as the political and social status quo…. Objectivity contends that ‘facts’ have to be accepted if there is to be objective discourse. It is considered subrational to question the status of facts. In mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry there are facts. It is therefore evident to objectivity that all human ratiocination which claims to be objective should adopt the impersonal stance of the scientist… Objectivity has ended up as being the equivalent of that truncated fragment of rationality which is generally called scientific. In the scientific objectivity, the thinker is excluded from the thought, and the personal involvement of the thinker in his work is denied and frustrated.”

One of the problems with scientific objectivity as a way of understanding life is that it eliminates much of our experience of life – our sense-impressions, our emotions, and all the realities that make up our everyday world. In their place science substitutes a knowledge of the mathematical properties of the world. Instead of a total, complete human world filled with meaning, we are given a formula. Perception and experience is replaced with data, with mathematical abstraction. The philosopher and rationalists of the scientific revolution proclaimed that we can only know what we can measure.

Donald M. Mackay, a research scientist specializing in the functioning of the brain at the University of Keele in England, wrote The Clockwork Image: A Christian perspective on science, in which he debunked the fallacy underlying many scientific arguments against Christianity. He called it ‘nothing buttery’.

“Its current philosophical label is ‘ontological reductionism’. Nothing-buttery is characterized by the notion that by reducing any phenomenon to its components you not only explain it, but explain it away. You can debunk love, or bravery, or sin for that matter, by finding the psychological or physiological mechanisms underlying the behavior in question.”

To illustrate his point he asks an electrician to tell us what is on the board of a neon sign. The electrician can give a careful description in electrical terms what makes the sign work without telling us the meaning of the sign. He can fail to mention the advertisement or message of the sign. The illustration demonstrates that scientific language can give us an accurate, technical, nothing but, explanation without giving us the whole story, the point or significance of the apparatus. A scientific description of the universe is limited to the components but doesn’t tell the whole story of life.

The ultimate reality for anyone is themselves. It is the individual, through his or her perception, who judges and evaluates the worth and meaning of life. “What one takes to be true, evident, obvious is a function of perspective. We select and arrange our impressions in accordance with our deepest fears or ambitions or both. Very often we are concerned not to find out what is true, but what will best support the argument or cause to which we are known to adhere, or which will show us up to be the brighter or the better man.” (Roger Poole)

Everything selected for the purposes of the argument, everything useful for the argument, is filtered through assumptions of the individual. These assumptions are already in existence. By a process of selection and exclusion, a worldview which is helpful and advantageous will be filtered through the hopes and fears, the expectations and the experiences of the subjective existing individual. What finally gets through to our mind is a set of perspectives which have been modified in the transmission of impressions.

We each have a private perspective on our personal history, which is shaped by our interpretation of what happens to us over the years. Every day we filter through a certain set of perspectives, and these integrate and stick together. We get used to them, they mold us to receiving a certain kind of perspective tomorrow. What is true for us is true because the way we view our personal history has shaped us into the people we are. When we argue for a certain point of view, we argue from the center of our personal history.

What is true for us is true because of our already existing structure of belief.

“It is to a person who already exists, complete in his hopes and fears, complete in his perspective on his history, that one addresses one’s arguments. He possesses already a vision of the world, a vision peculiarly his, which he has built up over the years with care and concern. What he does not want to understand, he will not accord the status of an argument. What runs against his interests, is not a ‘fact’. What is antipathetic to his own view, is not ‘objective’. What he disapproves of, is immoral. What he does, is right. What he stands for, is not to be questioned.” (Roger Poole)

Each of us, therefore, has an existing structure of belief, a worldview, a set of presuppositions or assumptions, a set of categories we have developed through which we interpret the data of our daily experiences to give life meaning. We have a set of lenses through which we view our lives and the world.

Faith is the decision I make on the worldview I wish to make my own. Faith is my perspective on which realities, which truth, which vision, I wish to make my assumption. It is my subjective, personal commitment to the reality that is compelling to me. It is my understanding of the reality that confronts me.

Jesus came into the world to confront each individual with the necessity to make a decision about him. Some people found it difficult to believe in him because they were looking for objective ‘facts’ to scientifically verify his claims. Jesus said,

“This is a wicked generation. It asks for a miraculous sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah. For as Jonah was a sign to the Ninevites, so also will the Son of Man be to this generation. The Queen of the South will rise at the judgment with the men of this generation and condemn them; for she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon’s wisdom, and now one greater than Solomon is here. The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and one greater than Jonah is here.”

The fact, or sign, that Jesus provided was himself. Just as Jonah, delivered from death by drowning through the whale, was the sign in his day, so is Jesus in his day. The message of Jonah evoked an immediate response in the Ninevites. The message of Jesus should evoke a greater response because of who he is. The assumptions of the people precluded them from seeing Jesus as the God-Man. They could only see him as ‘nothing but’ a Galilean preacher. They could not see the Message he embodied. This is still the case today for many. Later generations would also have the evidence of the resurrection. Just as the Ninevites were affected by the resurrected Jonah, so many would be affected by the appearance of the risen Jesus.

Even the queen of Sheba (Yemen) had been prepared to make a long trip to hear the wisdom of Solomon. Yet the people hearing Jesus had no journey to make. He was in their midst but they would not perceive in him the reality of God. Therefore they would be condemned for their blindness and refusal to believe what was in front of their eyes.

Jesus goes on to say,

“No one lights the lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden, or under a bowl. Instead he puts it on its stand, so that those who come in may see the light. Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are good, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are bad, your body also is full of darkness. See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness. Therefore, if your whole body is full of light, and no part of it dark, it will be completely lighted, as when the light of a lamp shines on you.”

I have a responsibility to receive the light that shines on my life and illuminates my understanding. If I have good eyes (i.e. believing eyes that are not veiled by reductionist or skeptical assumptions), the light will fill me. If I have bad eyes (i.e. sinful, unbelieving eyes that filter out the message that God is sending me in Jesus Christ), I will not receive the light he brings. “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned.”

The Pharisees, who refused to believe that Jesus was the Messiah when he healed the blind man, were characterized by Jesus as having bad eyes. “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked, “What? Are we blind too?” Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.”

The source of light, or truth, is outside me. I perceive it and interpret it according to my assumptions. When by faith I receive the light of Jesus as the lamp of God’s truth, I will be fully illuminated. Faith is my subjective reception of the objective light of Christ, that enables me to interpret my other assumptions. Christ throws light on my world.

In answer to those who questioned his credentials, and the source of his teaching, Jesus claimed that it came from God who sent him. But how do we know that this is the truth? Jesus said, “If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.” Lynn Anderson claims that the “very first and most important step toward faith in Christ is to decide whether or not you really want to believe and honestly face the reasons why you choose what you choose.” (If I Really Believe, Why Do I Have These Doubts)

Faith, when you get down to it, depends upon whether you choose to do God’s will (if God exists), whether or not you want to do God’s will. It comes down to motivation. If God exists, are you willing to respond to God’s call in Christ or not? This touches on the heart, or the will, not just the head, or the intellect. Anderson maintains that doubt is “more likely to be rooted in hidden, internal reasons of the will than in conscious, intellectual searching.” People may give all sorts of reasons why they are not believers in Christ, but more often than not, they have chosen not to believe.

What are some of these hidden, internal reasons of the will which block the motivation to believe?

There is the psychological defense. Doubters see belief in God as a psychological crutch. They view believers as emotionally insecure who have invented God because they couldn’t cut it alone. But what if we are created by God to be emotionally insecure without a loving relationship with him? What if we are designed by God to believe in him, and his absence leaves a vacuum in our lives which generates this need? The psychological need is a genuine need. Miguel de Unamuno said,

“To believe in God is, in the first instance, to wish there may be a God, to be unable to live without him…. if I do believe in God…it is principally because I want God to exist, and next because He reveals Himself to me through my heart, in the Gospel, through Christ, and through history. It is a matter of the heart.”

That is why the Bible says “And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” God rewards us with his love when we are genuinely seeking him.

Then there are the emotional needs not to believe in God. Our pride makes it difficult for us to admit we need God. Our relationships may be preventing us from believing – we don’t want our friends to think that we have gone religious. This is called in the Bible, ‘love for the world’. It would be ridiculous to refuse to accept that which we know to be true because we have an emotional need to appear self-sufficient and strong in the sight of others. Our pride and our secular friends will not last forever. They will fail when we most need emotional support. “The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.”

Another, and current, reason for doubt, is that of history. Many, as children, have suffered abuse from authority figures, either in their families, or in the church, which has served as an extended family. There are “large crowds of doubters who have been scarred through betrayal by professing believers – relatives, ministers, priests, elders, business partners, mates, mentors, or media evangelists. Anger, disillusionment, and mistrust over this kind of betrayal easily become transferred to God. And, again, the transfer sometimes occurs at hidden, subconscious levels that may surface in the disguise of doubt.”

Allied to this reason for doubt is the history of religions in the world. There has been so much violence and suffering perpetrated in the name of God. The institutional Church, which has enjoyed a position of privilege and power, has often used its position to do terrible things in the name of Christ. There are many people who called themselves Christians because it gave them power, but they did not behave as authentic followers of Christ. Jesus said that, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers.”

We must make a distinction, as Jesus did, between institutional Christianity and the genuine Christian. We do not worship the Church, but Jesus Christ.

Through the centuries much has been done in the name of Christianity that does not reflect the teachings of Jesus. When evil has been done in the name of Christ, it is not the will of God, but the will of sinful men. The early Christians were effective missionaries because they took care of their neighbors, the poor, widows, and others who were in need. They protected children, especially baby girls who were often thrown away at birth.

Most genuine Christians live under persecution, and suffer in the name of Christ rather than make others suffer. You can’t blame Jesus and his followers for all the evil that has happened in his name. Some missionaries exploited natives they were trying to convert, but most missionaries were faithful to the gospel of Christ and saved the natives, where they worked, from cruel barbarities. They established schools and hospitals, and gave hope to those they served.

While Muslims reject Christianity because of the Crusades (although their own history of violent military conquest and terrorism is far worse), many Jews reject Jesus because of the Holocaust. Martin Luther contributed to the problem with his hatred of the Jews. Luther was a genuine Christian, but he was sadly and grievously mistaken in his views about the Jews. In that instance, he did not live up to the ideals of Jesus. In contrast to the passivity of so many Christians and church leaders in Germany under Hitler, there was the heroic example of Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer of the Confessing Church movement, who were willing to suffer and die rather than acquiesce to the official government policy.

Bonhoeffer, who was executed by the Nazis for being implicated in the plot to assassinate Hitler wrote from prison,

“If we are to look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law; the power of some needs the folly of others. It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted or destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgment, and – more or less unconsciously – give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves. The fact that the fool is often stubborn must not mislead us into thinking that he is independent. One feels in fact, when talking to him, that one is dealing, not with the man himself, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like, which have taken hold of him. He is under a spell, he is blinded, his very nature is being misused and exploited. Having thus become a passive instrument, the fool will be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. Here lies the danger of a diabolical exploitation that can do irreparable damage to human beings.”

If history can be a reason to doubt belief in Jesus, it also provides many good reasons to believe in Jesus. Atheism has resulted in terrible violations in human rights. Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung were all perpetrators of great violence. Christianity, on the other hand, has been deeply involved in helping the poor, the disadvantaged, and the disenfranchised. Christians built great educational and cultural institutions. The positives of Christianity overwhelm the negatives. Nevertheless, our failures should cause us to be humble in our attitude toward others. There are nameless men and women who have humbly and courageously upheld the Gospel through the centuries, who have served in obscurity, who have given their lives to help others, who have left the world a better place, and who have struggled to do the right thing despite incredible pressure to do otherwise. The civilizing ideas of liberty, conscience and truth can be traced to Christianity.

Lastly, a person may be reluctant to have faith because he or she simply doesn’t want to do things God’s way. Many people do not want to become Christians because they do not want to have to obey or follow the teaching of Jesus. They don’t want to give up their freedom to do their own thing. They want to spend their money on themselves and their selfish pleasures rather than see it as loaned by God to do his will. Stewardship, sharing and giving are a tremendous threat to this kind of person. It is not so much a matter of doubt and faith as a matter of choosing to do one’s own will rather than God’s will. It is not so much an intellectual reason to doubt as a moral one. Helmut Thielicke put it this way:

“If a person learns to bring God into the picture and therefore begins to believe, then he ceases to be so passionately self-willed. Looking back, he discovers that it was this very autonomy, this centering his life on his own ego, that made him seek unbelief and made him fear that faith would threaten his self-will.”

We choose whether to believe in Christ or not. We choose whether to follow Christ’s teachings or not. We choose based upon all sorts of motivations, all sorts of hidden, inner reasons of the will. If we have a problem in believing we need to be brutally honest with ourselves. We need to take inventory of our inner selves. Could there be any reason – either conscious or buried in our subconscious – why we might not want to believe? Take out that reason and look at it honestly and see whether it constitutes a genuine barrier to believe or simply an excuse to avoid submitting our lives to God’s will.

Remember that Jesus said, “if anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.” If you choose to risk doing God’s will by living as though God exists and has a claim on your life, you will discover whether the teaching of Christ comes from God or not.

Even if you discover that you honestly don’t want to believe, at least the uncovering of your real motive will enable you to deal with your decision more openly and honestly. Or it may propel you forward to overcome your reluctance, and cause you to be willing to risk believing after all. You need to choose every day what you believe.

Soren Kierkegaard writes: “In the end the archenemy of decision is cowardice. Cowardice is constantly at work trying to break off the good agreement of decision with eternity… Cowardice settles deep in our souls like idle mists on stagnant waters. From it arise unhealthy vapors and deceiving phantoms. The thing that cowardice fears most is decision; for decision always scatters the mists, at least for a moment. Cowardice thus hides behind the thought it likes best of all: the crutch of time. Cowardice and time always find a reason for not hurrying, for saying, ‘Not today, but tomorrow’, whereas God in heaven and the eternal say: ‘Do it today. Now is the day of salvation.’ The eternal refrain of decision is: ‘Today, today.’ But cowardice holds back, hold us up. If only cowardice would appear in all its baseness, one would recognize it for what it is and fight it immediately.

Whereas decision reminds us of the end to come, cowardice turns us away from finality… A good decision is our will to do everything we can within our power. It means to serve God with all that we’ve got, be it little or much. Every person can do that. In the end, failure to decide prevents one from doing what is good… This much is certain: the greatest thing each person can do is to give himself to God utterly and unconditionally – weaknesses, fears, and all.”

What does one have to lose? And consider all that one can gain. Jim Elliot’s famous remark about mortal life and eternity is still profound: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” He was martyred at age 29 trying to bring the gospel of Christ to the Auca Indians in Ecuador. The witness of his commitment made a profound impact on me at age 16, and resulted in my offering myself for the ordained ministry. I was not alone. His example spurred many to similar endeavor. His life and death brought forth much fruit.

For many years, my wife and I sponsored a needy child through the work of World Vision. Four times a year their magazine came in the mail. It was filled with stories of how children throughout the world were being helped by World Vision. But from time to time there are also heart-rending stories of the plight of millions more who needed help. Some people attribute evil to God, and claim that since he is supposed to be the author of all things that he should be blamed for diseases and poverty. I have a local correspondent who sent me a poem by Philip Appleman to bolster his argument for atheism. It included this stanza:

I think that no one ever made

a poem as powerful as AIDS,

or plagues that may in summer kill

half the bishops in Brazil

and share the good Lord’s Final Answer

with clots and cholera and cancer –

for God concocted pox to mock us,

staph and syph and streptococcus:

poems are made by bards or hacks,

but only God makes cardiacs.

Doubt rears its head in my life when I start entertaining difficult questions about the world. When I learn about primitive and poverty-stricken human beings, I ask myself how they can ever find life in all its fullness? I read about people with little hope, who live on the margins of life, like the huddled masses in Bangladesh, or the refugees in various countries of the world, and I ask what purpose God has for their lives? I see children who are crippled by land mines, or abused by parents, and I ask how God can be real and loving in the face of such evil? I see people who are mentally ill, or handicapped in other ways, and ask questions about how they can experience peace and joy in their apparent vacancy, watching television all day, doped up and chain smoking? I look at my own life and wonder how a person like myself, who has never intentionally missed a meal, who has had the opportunity of education and travel, and never been unemployed, should be privileged and others deprived? I look up into the sky and realize that the universe goes on for billions of light years, and wonder how my life, or that of anyone on this planet can be significant? Are we just numbers, I wonder? How do we make sense of life?

What questions do you have? All of us have difficult questions that affect our ability to have faith, and give us reasons to doubt. Some of you might have questions about loved ones dying. When wars occur, and accidents happen, and tragedy strikes, we ask, “Why?” If there is a God in heaven how can these things happen? Where can we go with our questions?

I go to the book of Job. You know the story. Job loses his children, his livestock, and his health. He is destitute and depressingly sick. His friends come to comfort him but end up making him feel worse. Eliphaz accused Job of unacknowledged sin. Bildad said that he needed to repent and God would restore him. Zophar chimed in with similar advice. Their answers to the questions I raised would have been that it was God’s will that other people suffer.

Job refused to accept his friends’ shopworn belief that calamity had struck him because of his sin. I refuse to believe that people suffer and die because it is God’s will, or because God wanted them in heaven, or that they are going to hell anyway. I want more of an answer than that. Just because I am a believer doesn’t mean that I settle for simplistic explanations of life’s problems. I struggle every day with the tragedies that I see on the television screen and in the newspapers. I have questions to which I have no answers as yet. I can identify with Job when he cried out to God, “Oh, that I had someone to hear me! … let the Almighty answer me.” (Job 31:35)

Job asked a lot of questions and he got his answers in the form of more questions which the Lord asked him (Job 38-41). “I will question you and you will answer me.” (Job 38:3) In essence God said to him, “You cannot understand because you are not who I am. You have not existed as I have existed. You have not created as I have created. You cannot comprehend what I comprehend.”

Gary Parker in The Gift of Doubt: From crisis to authentic faith, writes that he found three revolutionary truths in the book of Job that transformed his thinking about God’s ways in the world.

“First, I discovered that God has no obligation to answer any of our questions. God came to Job and he comes to us not because we force him to answer, but because he chooses of his own free will to share his Person with us. When God spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, he did so not to give him all the answers, as if God were on trial, but to place Job on trial. We cannot hold God hostage to our questions.”

God has no responsibility to acknowledge, much less answer, all our questions. God’s ways, as Isaiah puts it, are higher than our ways, and his thoughts are higher than our thoughts. God graciously answers many of our questions, but he has no obligation to answer any. When we were children, we were asking “why?” all the time. As parents we know we cannot answer them all to a child’s satisfaction, and so we resort to having to say at times, “You’ll understand when you grow up.” Not every “why” of life has a reasonable answer. There are things we cannot understand, or as Job put it, “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.”

“Second, God does not count our questions as sin against us. Significantly, at the conclusion of the book of Job, God returns Job’s wealth to him. Then God rebukes the three friends who had counseled Job incorrectly. God never changed his initial opinion of Job as “a blameless and upright man.”

The questions Job raises with God are legitimate. They are questions any human being in pain would ask. The Bible is full of examples of seekers after the truth that are asking good questions about the struggles of life. There is no attempt in the Bible to silence discussion or debate. Christianity has always been at the forefront of enquiry, research and education. Our God delights in us using our minds to understand his creation, the nature of grace and the problem of evil.

“Third, the questions we ask can carry us into a deeper understanding of God than we have ever previously enjoyed. Job would never have known God on such an intimate level if he had not dared to express his pain and uncertainties. In Genesis 32 we read how Jacob wrestled with God. In that encounter Jacob moved from a superficial relationship with the Lord into a face-to-face fellowship. At the conclusion of that dramatic episode Jacob said, “I have seen God face to face.” In a similar fashion, Job admitted, “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.” (Job 42:5) When we wrestle with God honestly and openly, we have the grand opportunity to develop a deeper intimacy than does anyone who stands at a distance and waves a cheery hand.”

“The honest struggle of Job with God can become helpful to us in our movement from doubt into faith… Through Job, and through other biblical stories, we see that God does not condemn us for our uncertainty. Instead, through the Job story we learn that God would much prefer our honest doubts to a dishonest faith. After all, God is the only one big enough to handle our uncertainties… Dr John Carlton once said, “God can stand our questionings much better than he can bear our indifference.”

When we find ourselves questioning the inequities of life, and we cry out in protest at the tragedies we see, God does not resent our questions, but welcomes them, for he cries out with us. It was God who heard the groaning of his people enslaved in Egypt and mounted a rescue operation using Moses. It was Jesus who reached out to the hungry, the poor, the crippled and the oppressed to heal them and give them hope. It was Jesus who wept over Jerusalem: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” (Luke 13:34)

The playlet The Long Silence, says it all.

“At the end of time, billions of people were scattered on a great plain before God’s throne. Most shrank back from the brilliant light before them. But some groups near the front talked heatedly – not with cringing shame but with belligerence. ‘Can God judge us? How can he know about suffering? snapped a pert young brunette. She ripped open a sleeve to reveal a tattooed number from a Nazi concentration camp. ‘We endured terror… beatings… torture… death!’

In another group an Afro-American lowered his collar. ‘What about this/’ he demanded, showing an ugly rope burn. ‘Lynched… for no crime but being black!’ In another crowd, a pregnant schoolgirl with sullen eyes: ‘Why should I suffer,’ she murmured. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

Far out on the plain there were hundreds of such groups. Each had a complaint against God for the evil and suffering he permitted in his world. How lucky God was to live in heaven where all was sweetness and light, where there was no weeping or fear, no hunger or hatred. What did God know of all that man had been forced to endure in this world? For God leads a pretty, sheltered life, they said.

So each of these groups sent forth their leader, chosen because he had suffered the most: a Jew, an Afro-American, a person from Hiroshima, a horribly deformed arthritic, a thalidomide child. In the center of the plain they consulted with each other. At last they were ready to present their case. It was rather clever.

Before God could be qualified to be their judge, he must endure what they had endured. Their decision was that God should be sentenced to live on earth – as a man!

‘Let him be born a Jew. Let the legitimacy of his birth be doubted. Give him work so difficult that even his family will think him out of his mind when he tries to do it. Let him be betrayed by his closest friends. Let him face false charges, be tried by a prejudiced jury and convicted by a cowardly judge. Let him be tortured.

At the last let him see what it means to be terribly alone. Then let him die. Let him die so that there is no doubt that he died. Let there be a great host of witnesses to verify it.’

As each leader announced his portion of the sentence, loud murmurs of approval went up from the throng of the people assembled. And when the last had finished pronouncing sentence, there was a long silence. No one moved. For suddenly all knew that God had already served his sentence.” (John Stott, The Cross of Christ, 336-337)

God did not stay in his ivory tower and issue pronouncements about the world. He came in Christ to suffer and die with us. “Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8) His followers walk in his steps, and walk the way of suffering, not knowing the answers to all the questions that they and others have asked down through the centuries. Anybody who has walked with Jesus has wrestled with pain and suffering, and the dread of insignificance. That is why we walk by faith and not by sight. We follow despite not having all the answers. Because God allows freedom in the universe there will be tragedies, and God does not directly cause them. In fact, he actually grieves with us when we suffer them. The answers will come as we experience the love of God in the Cross of Jesus. For the Creator is also the Savior.

Some people, like Billy Graham, enter into a full-blown faith all at once when they experience a spiritual conversion or personal encounter with Christ. More people, like Billy’s wife, Ruth, experience a slow growth of their faith over a lifetime. The apostle Paul noticed this in his comments about the Christians at Thessalonica: “We ought to give thanks to God for you.. and rightly so, because your faith is growing more and more.”

When something grows, it develops from one stage to another. Shakespeare portrayed man as developing through seven ages:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and pewking in the nurses arms.

And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel,

And shining morning face, creeping like a snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like a furnace, with a woful ballad

Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,

With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws, and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

His youthful hose well sav’d a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big, manly voice,

Turning again towards childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness, and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

(As You Like It, vii, 139)

Men and women develop through different stages in life so that the same person may appear in different roles, and may re-invent himself for the purpose. Opinions may change over a lifetime as new knowledge is received and assimilated. Faith is no different. Faith looks different at each stage of its growth. When we physically or emotionally develop, we change over the years. Our faith changes also. Let us look at these stages of faith and see what they can tell us about the process of change that is involved.

There have been several studies of the development of faith. During a time of great stress and challenge I came across The Critical Journey: Stages in the Life of Faith, by Janet Hagberg and Robert Guelich. It is a description of the spiritual journey which addresses the struggle to find meaning and purpose, the crisis of values and identity at mid-life, the quest for self-actualization, and the healing of early religious experiences. The authors’ goal is to help their reader to understand where he is in his search and where others are on theirs. The sections on the journey inward, and coming up against a wall in my relationship with God, spoke to me about the stage I found myself in at the time. It was an accurate diagnosis of my condition. I found it invaluable as a guide to moving on to the next stage of my faith.

In Will Our Children Have Faith? John Westerhoff suggests four stages.

The first two stages he characterizes as faith’s infancy and childhood. That is when we experience faith from those around us. We don’t actually have to choose faith for ourselves because it is part of our environment as children. Paul talks about Timothy being raised in the faith of his grandmother, Lois, and his mother Eunice. Or we may go through a conversion experience, a born again experience and be babies in the faith, needing to be spoon-fed for a while. “Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up to salvation.”

When people came to faith in Christ in my church in London we would ask them to attend the Nursery Class, so named because it represented where they were in their faith. Like babies and young children it is a beautiful stage when people are open, innocent, sincere and delightful. We affiliate with the faith of our church, or youth group, or denomination. That is why young people can be so enthusiastic about their faith. They have accepted what they have been taught, and can be intolerant of those who disagree with them.

The third stage is faith’s adolescence when we begin to question everything in order to decide what we are prepared to believe. It is part of individuation, of becoming our own person rather than being the clone of our community or peer group. Westerhoff calls this ‘searching faith’. It is healthy to question so that we can make choices for ourselves that mean something to us. If this stage is discouraged, it can drive seekers into negative options. They may walk out of their rigid church, or their high-control family, in search of freedom of inquiry. Or, if they stay in their group, they may retreat inwardly and become angry and silent. Or, they may stifle their questions, and pretend to believe like everyone else, and sacrifice their integrity. Later in life searchers who have stifled their growth may blame their repressive churches, or their dogmatic parents, for their indifference. But we all have to take responsibility for our own growth in faith.

I can remember, when I was Dean of the Chapel at Gordon College, there was a student who would not attend chapel, or participate in an alternate chapel program of small discussion groups. He was in a high state of rebellion against his father, and all that he represented as a prominent Baptist pastor. In the end I met with him one on one and we discussed anything he wanted to talk about. He worked through his adolescent questioning, went through a failed marriage, and is now a successful Christian writer, and a practicing Roman Catholic.

This stage can be prolonged way beyond what is healthy. We may call it a case of arrested development. The searcher may “slip into a holding pattern, forever circling, never landing, and thus effectively avoiding responsibility.” Although he may no longer be an adolescent physically speaking, the adult searcher becomes an agnostic, taking refuge in the questions as a means of keeping commitment at arm’s length. The apostle James has this person in mind when he wrote, “he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think that he will receive anything from the Lord, he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.”

“If we let reasonable doubts linger indefinitely, they can make us spiritual hypochondriacs – or perpetual adolescents. Paul talks about those who are “always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth.”. There is a time when you have to ‘fish or cut bait’. You can’t sit on the fence forever. Those who will not move, who will not get off the fence, are making the decision to remain immature. They play mind games with themselves and take refuge in intellectual excuses for not being able to make a commitment either way.

The fourth stage is faith’s adulthood. This is when we own our faith in Christ as authentically ours and not just borrowed from someone else, or something we profess in order to fit in with others. It has to do more with a personal relationship with Christ than the rituals of an institution.

Adult faith doesn’t know all the answers, but is comfortable with trusting in God who does. The faith that has grown to this point is able to give up control to Christ and be comfortable in some settled convictions. The apostle Paul could say in the midst of his sufferings, “I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him.” It is trust in the person of Christ, who, we are convinced, is able to deliver on the promises we have received, and our future well-being.

Where is your faith? What stage are you in? Are you beginning to wonder if your faith is simply a reflection of the group with which you have been affiliated all your life? Or do you feel unsettled, confused, doubting more than you are believing? Doubts need not be bad. Your questions may be genuine. They may need to be addressed in order for your faith to grow to the next stage.

On the other hand, how long have you been searching? If you find that you take more delight in with-holding commitment, and you secretly resent having to close your options, be careful. Your well-fed doubt may really be a cop-out, and it may be time to move on. Don’t be afraid to break out of your holding pattern and resume your flight plan! When we get stuck in our stage of faith, we are no longer growing. We can become hardened and defensive about where we are.

People get stuck for all sorts of reasons. When we get stuck for long enough we get trapped, and we may not know it. Our stage becomes a cage. “By this time you ought to be teachers… but you need milk like a child.”

Getting stuck occurs sometimes from our fear of facing the unknown. Other times it comes from crises that we cannot control. Or it maybe our fear that we cannot control God or our future. Some of us are never satisfied with our stage of faith. We are always looking for more information. We are insatiable learners in the faith. We go to every personal growth experience available. Self-growth can be addictive. We appear to be very open on the surface, true seekers of the truth. But we are closed just below the surface. We are simply afraid to surrender control to God. The risk is too high.

One of the difficulties in relating to others is that we become aware that they may be in a different stage from us. Being in a meeting with others at different stages from us can leave us perplexed and frustrated. It is like adolescents trying to understand what it means to be living in adulthood, or children trying to understand the inner life of seniors. For example, people at the adult stage, secure with what is right for them and with a strong sense of belonging, may think that those who appear to be questioning, or even rejecting their childhood faith, are not strong enough, not faithful enough, not willing enough, or just plain not Christian. There have been times when I have been stuck in my faith development. I have lost my vision, or become disillusioned, or have felt depressed and tired. It is not that I have doubted God, but his presence has seemed less real than at other times. During one such period, I had to be prepared to listen to what God was saying to me rather than trying to keep in control of the agenda. I became aware that my shadow side consisted of those things I saw in other people that I did not like. I had to learn about forgiveness for myself and others. That led on to acceptance and love. Because of my vulnerability, I could sense God’s presence in a new way. It meant asking why I was doing some things. It involved taking a risk in listening to what God was leading me to do that was different from before. I sang: “Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me. Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me. Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.” All this required time away from my busyness, a time of solitude – time to reflect.

Faith can go through all stages every day. Some of us find ourselves moving back and forth between stages of faith, searching awhile, and then reverting to childhood trust. There is nothing wrong with childhood faith. Jesus said that we must become children to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Even mature faith keeps on searching, and sometimes cycling through periods of doubt.

Sometimes we cannot see beyond the present difficulties of life. In those times of darkness God gives us just enough faith to take the next step in the fog. We grow in faith as we trust that we are following Christ, even though we cannot see him clearly. Yet we believe that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that true Joy is to be found in going forward in faith, even when we do not completely understand.

King George VI, in his Christmas broadcast in 1939, when the United Kingdom was facing the Nazi threat, quoted Minnie Lou Haskins,

“And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’”

A Prayer:

Lord God, you know what stage of faith I am in at the moment. Enable me to move forward and not be stuck. Help me to let go of my ego, and to recognize that you are God, and to accept you as the Lord of my life. Enable me to be open to your direction. Direct my every thought, word, and action. May I experience your presence in my life, and respond accordingly. I surrender control of my life to you. May the love of Christ control me, and the power of your Spirit refresh me. Give me the courage to follow where you may lead, and to grow in faith, hope and love in my relationships with others. Amen.

Jon Guttman, in his Editorial for the June, 2002 edition of Military History, wrote about three decisive battles that owed their outcomes to calculated risk-taking. He says that officers today are taught risk assessment – the art of comparing the importance of one’s mission against the risks involved. There is actually a matrix that can be used to calculate the relative likelihood and severity of the risk, enabling the leader to determine what can be done to reduce those risks. The risk must always be calculated against the reward. There is a difference between a reckless risk and a calculated risk, and a commander who is skilled at the latter will invariably accomplish more than one who will not accept risk at all.

He cited the calculated risk taken in June, 1942 by Japanese Admiral Yamamoto. Desperate to draw the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carrier force into a decisive battle, Yamamoto launched a diversionary carrier strike against Dutch Harbor, Alaska, and invaded Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian Islands, at the same time that he dispatched the Combined Fleet to Midway atoll in the Central Pacific. The complicated stratagem was meant to compel the Americans to divide their carrier force, allowing Yamamoto’s main force to annihilate those that tried to defend Midway. But it was undone by the Americans having cracked Japanese codes and learning his true intentions.

Aided by that knowledge, Admiral Chester Nimitz took a calculated risk of his own, sending all three of his remaining first-line fleet carriers to confront the Combined Fleet’s four carriers at Midway. The course of the battle that followed highlighted just how much of a risk Nimitz took of losing everything. But the final outcome certainly justified that risk. In exchange for the loss of the carrier Yorktown, the Americans sank all four of their principal opponents. Yamamoto got the decisive battle he had sought, but without the outcome he had desired, as the Japanese navy retired from its first major defeat in 350 years.

What risks would you be willing to take to win in the battle of life? The patriarch Abraham took enormous risks in his life. Hebrews 11:8-19 records that when God called him to leave his home, and his country, and his family, he went, even though he did not know where he was going. He went, we are told, by faith. Faith here is characterized as risk-taking.

Abraham is held up as the father of us all by faith. St. Paul writes: “He is the father of us all. As it is written: ‘I have made you the father of many nations.’ He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed – the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were. Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the ruler of many nations.”

Soren Kierkegaard writes, “Surely Christianity’s intention is that a person use this life to venture out, to do so in such a way that God can get hold of him, and that one gets to see whether or not he actually has faith.”

Often the issues of doubt and faith are described in terms of the intellectual questions people have about God, and life. But, maybe the more difficult questions have to do with whether we are willing to venture out, to risk, to let God get hold of us, to see whether or not we actually have faith. There are many people who profess to believe in God and to follow Christ who have no faith in this sense. They are armchair Christians, who talk the language of Christianity but do precious little about it. Kierkegaard again,

“Truth exists for a particular individual only as he himself produces it in action. If the individual prevents the truth from being for him in that way, we have a phenomenon of the demonic. Truth has always had many loud proclaimers, but the question is whether a person will in the deepest sense acknowledge the truth, allow it to permeate his whole being, accept all its consequences, and not have an emergency hiding place for himself and a Judas kiss for the consequences.”

Abraham did not have the Bible. He did not have a church. He lived in a pagan society. Archeologists have discovered that that Ur of the Chaldees, located on the Euphrates River in what is today southern Iraq, nineteen hundred years BC, boasted an elaborate system of writing, sophisticated mathematical calculations, educational facilities, and extensive business and religious records. They worshipped Nammu the moon-god. The royal cemetery reveals that ritual burials were sealed with the horrors of human sacrifice. Abraham worshipped these pagan gods. At this point in human history “the world was lost in degrading views of God. From the bull-worship of Crete, to the animal deities of brilliant Egypt, from the worship of the Sun-god on the Phoenician coast, to the sadistic and sensual deities of which the sailors who traded to the Indus and the Malabar coast could tell, it was one wide story of burdensome corruption. Some search for something purer, better, holier must have stirred in the heart of Abraham of Ur,” because the Most High God appeared to him and called him out of his native land to go, he knew not where. And he went! What kind of risk was he taking to do that? What motivated him to pull up the stakes of his tent, leave his known world for the unknown, and go on the road? What sort of reward was he anticipating? God made him some promises which made his journey and dislocation worthwhile.

“The Lord said to Abram, ‘Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.’”

He made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country. He looked forward to the city that was to come, whose architect and builder is God. He saw his life in this world as a journey where nothing was permanent. He did not put roots down where he lived because he had invested in the future.

God told him that he was to have offspring as numerous as the stars in the heavens, but no children were born to him and Sarah. Then the Lord told him that his wife was to have a child in her old age. Abraham thought it was so funny that he fell facedown and laughed about the absurdity of it.

St. Paul comments: “Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead – since he was about a hundred years old – and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised.”

When the child does indeed come and grows into a boy, God tells him to go and sacrifice him as a burnt offering on Mount Moriah, and Abraham, saddled up his donkey, and set out to do it. How could he do it? Abraham took the calculated risk that God, who gave him Isaac, when his and Sarah’s bodies were past bearing children, could also raise the dead if he were sacrificed.

Kierkegaard calls Abraham the knight of faith, for he is willing to do what is absurd, to take the ultimate of risks in obedience to God.

“He who walks the narrow road of faith has no one to advise him – no one understands him. Faith is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it; for that which unites all human life is passion, and faith is a passion.”

Did Abraham know all the answers to the questions about God and life? No, of course not. He laughed when God said that he would have a son. He must have doubted at times. But he was passionate in his willingness to take the risk of faith. It was a calculated risk to him because he believed that he could trust the God who called him to venture out in his life.

Miguel de Unamuno wrote,

“Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God himself.” Faith that never doubts is a dead faith because it is never exercised.

Abraham did not receive what was promised in his own lifetime. “They saw them and welcomed them from a distance…. Instead, they were longing for a better country – a heavenly one.” He took the calculated risk that God would deliver on his promises.

Kierkegaard:

“Again without risk, no faith; the more risk, the more faith… The absurd is that eternal truth has come into existence in time, that God has come into existence, has been born, has grown up, has come into existence exactly as an individual human being, indistinguishable from any other human being…. Christianity claims to be the eternal, essential truth that has come into existence in time. It proclaims itself as the paradox and thus requires the inwardness of faith – that which is an offense to the Jews, foolishness to the Greeks, and an absurdity to the understanding… To know a creed by rote is, quite simply, paganism. This is because Christianity is inwardness. Christianity is paradox, and paradox requires but one thing: the passion of faith.”

The journey to faith in Christ requires risk, and change. It is as anxiety provoking as undertaking a major trip to an unknown destination. Abraham undertook such a trip and became a model for faith. Life is such a journey. We never know what the future has in store for us. Unexpected challenges cause us to have to respond with decisions and actions that we never anticipated having to make.

In March 2000 I received a call to accept the position of Pastor of Amelia Plantation Chapel on Amelia Island in Florida. I had been living for fourteen years in San Antonio, Texas, where I was the Rector of Christ Episcopal Church, a large congregation in the historic part of the city. Before receiving this call I had anticipated completing twenty years at Christ Church and then retiring back to north-east Florida where we had lived for ten years before moving to Texas. It is true that I had been praying about my future, and was open to alternative possibilities, but I did not expect my prayers to be answered so quickly and in such an unusual way. I guess I did not rightly know what to expect. God surprised me with an option I had not considered.

Amelia Plantation Chapel is an inter-denominational congregation, of mainly retired people from all over the nation, who moved to Amelia Island to enjoy its climate, environment, stunning ocean-side beauty, recreational amenities, and proximity to the city of Jacksonville with all its resources. I had worked in Jacksonville, was familiar with the area, and had many friends there. It was just where we wanted to move back to when we retired. But this was a job!

Did I really want to down-size that much, from a busy, multi-staff church in the heart of a major, diverse metropolitan area, where I was established? In addition, I was about to leave on a three month sabbatical as a Visiting Fellow at St. John’s College in the University of Durham. The timing seemed odd. Yet I was about to be 59 years old, and was aware that I needed to decide what I wanted to do for the next ten years of my professional life. Did I want to continue to do the same thing in the same place, or did I want to try something different? There were enormous risks involved. I would have to take a cut in compensation for the first 18 months. There was no guarantee that the congregation would grow under my leadership. I would be exchanging a sure thing for something quite uncertain.

I, of course, talked it over with trusted friends, and wrote down the pros and the cons of moving. But what helped me the most was an article I read at that time in a business magazine, FAST COMPANY. It was an interview by Polly Labarre with philosopher and management consultant Peter Koestenbaum. He styled himself as a philosopher who helped leaders in business to be successful human beings. This is what he said which resonated with me and enabled me to move forward in my life’s journey.

“How do we make truly difficult choices? How do we act when the risks seem overwhelming? How can we muster the guts to burn our bridges and to create a condition of no return?” The real issues are: “What kind of life do I want to lead? What is my destiny? How much evil am I willing to tolerate?” He quoted Kierkegaard, “Anxiety rules the human condition… it can serve as a powerful, productive force in your life. Anxiety is the natural condition. Anxiety leads to action. Anxiety is the experience of growth itself. It is what we feel when we go from one stage to the next. Go where the pain is.” Koestenbaum went on to say, “One of the gravest problems in life is self-limitation. We create defense mechanisms to protect us from the anxiety that comes from freedom. We refuse to fulfill our potential. We limit how we live so that we can limit the amount of anxiety that we experience. But no significant decision – personal or organizational – has ever been undertaken without being attended by an existential crisis, or without a commitment to wade through anxiety, uncertainty and guilt.”

After mulling these words over, I spent two hours with a counselor who had been helping me to explore issues relating to my personal identity and future priorities. After several days of working through the details, I made the decision to go forward to the next stage of my life, and embraced the uncertainty of the future over the present.

If you want to have faith, then you must be willing to do what God is calling you to do. What is it that he is calling you to do? Listen, open yourself to his inner voice, and you will hear. But you must be willing to act, to risk, to venture, as did Abraham. The reward is worthwhile.